Session Details

Peatlands cover a large proportion of the mid-high latitudes and significant areas of the tropics. They contain around one third of global soil carbon, are still sequestering further carbon, and contribute to emissions of methane. They are also increasingly used as palaeoclimate archives because of relatively rapid accumulation rates, a direct linkage to hydroclimate and a diverse range of paleoenvironmental proxies. Recent workshops held under INQUA Project 0804 ‘Ombrotrophic peatlands as Holocene palaeoenvironmental archives: towards a global network’, suggest that there is now sufficient data density to develop large scale synoptic insights into past carbon cycling and palaeoclimates. This session will cover; i) reconstruction of peatland extent and accumulation and their implications for atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane, ii) data integration of palaeoclimate reconstructions in relation to past climate dynamics. We particularly encourage contributions that combine data and modelling approaches, deal with methodological issues in data integration and assimilation, and target specific hypotheses of regional climate dynamics.